DC’s traffic cameras catching fewer offenses—because they’re broken

Officials insisted drivers were just being safer, but that's not the whole story.

This week in Washington, DC, officials acknowledged that the district had seen a dramatic drop off in revenues from tickets issued by speeding and red light cameras because of malfunctioning batteries. While some authorities had been quick to applaud the traffic cameras for reducing the number of speeding and red light violations, it seems that increased safety is not the primary factor in fewer tickets being given out.

The Washington Post reported that when the local police department took over the maintenance of the cameras from American Traffic Solutions, the contractor who sold the district the cameras, the upkeep faltered, causing outages. Assistant Police Chief Lamar D. Greene said in a statement that “extreme cold and snow” last winter contributed to a number of battery failures. “We could not change the batteries because they were not accessible, or the temperature affected the charge,” Greene said. “We have taken additional steps to enhance internal temperature controls since last winter, alleviating this problem.”

In fiscal year 2014, Washington, DC, raked in less than $34 million, down $38 million from around $75 million the year before. That dramatic reduction in revenue caused the city's financial officials to worry, but “maintenance concerns never figured into city officials’ public explanations for the shortfall,” the Post stated. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier even applauded the cameras, saying “This demonstrates that drivers are changing their behavior. The fact that infractions are going down is a good thing in my view. Automated traffic enforcement is and always has been about safety.”

Still, Washington, DC, officials insist that broken cameras are not the only cause for reductions in the number of tickets given out. Some have cited increased speed limits, while Greene said that 2014 did see a 10 percent reduction in traffic fatalities, so the presence of the cameras may be doing some good.

Further Reading

Still, that explanation is likely to have some skeptics. In December, the Chicago Tribune released the results of a massive study it commissioned to test the utility of red light cameras (although not speeding cameras) in that city. The study found that in intersections where a camera was present, there was actually a 22 percent increase in rear-end injury collisions, although there was a 15 percent reduction in angle and turning injury crashes in those same intersections.

Traffic cameras have often been a source of controversy—in Chicago last summer, at least 13,000 motorists were cited with undeserved tickets, and in August, American Traffic Solutions failed to notify 17,000 drivers in a region of New Jersey that they had been issued a ticket within 90 days. Because of this lengthy period of time between the infraction and the notice, the New Jersey cities in question forgave the fines.

Many municipal and state governments have moved in recent years to ban traffic cameras from their streets. Mississippi and Iowa City are two such governments to do away with automated traffic enforcement as a revenue generator.